Holding MPs to account: a Truro experiment

To hold our MPs to account we need to know what they promised to do before they were elected. We also need to have a clearer sense of what we expect them to do. How can we achieve these aims?

I want to share with others one approach to re-imagining democracy which
may or may not work. It is small scale, experimental and with no
certainty of success but even its shortcomings and failures will, I hope,
afford some useful learning lessons for all of us.

It attempts to tackle two issues relating to representative democracy.
The first is the absence of any clear, independent record of what candidates
actually say and commit to. Cast your mind back to the last election and try
Googling an issue of concern – can you find anything? There may be
scattered references in local newspapers or on defunct blogs but the most
important content has likely been deleted or removed, probably soon after the
2010 election ended. What your MP said then might be a source of
some embarrassment now – or worse! But it is too late, the information has been
deleted.

Nor can you look to manifestos or speeches by our political
leaders kept on party websites dating back to 2010; as is all too clear from
David Cameron’s early speeches and promises of ‘no top down reform of the NHS’,
speeches are taken down if they later prove to be too
contentious and we are then left with quotes and extracts from second hand
sources.

In an age of ‘information deluge’ that is an astonishing omission. With
no clear independent record of what our local parliamentary candidates say, how
can we effectively call our representatives to account?

The answer I suggest, is only if we take on that task ourselves. What we have
tried to do in Truro is to create an election
website which sets out some key issues and asks all parliamentary candidates
for a detailed written response in their own words. That gets
round the problem of hustings events where a candidate – now MP – later
claims that they have been misquoted, quoted out of context or that the record
of the event is incomplete.

The second is to tackle head on an overcentralised party machine that
positions candidates as outposts of Party HQ. Even those with genuine regard for
constituents' concerns have little wriggle room to take an independent stance.
They are foot soldiers answerable to the party whip, not our elected
representatives. It will take time to break this stranglehold but I suggest a
first step is for constituents to come together and start to develop their own
pledge, set of proposals or even their own manifesto. That is a tall order and
one that requires far more time than is available now. Instead, what we have
tried to do is avoid open ended questions that invite a speech rather than an
answer. We have set out our own manifesto proposal on – in this instance
– Climate Change and the NHS. We have then invited candidates to either
publicly commit to our pledges. Whether or not they do, they are invited to
give a detailed answer which stands as their definitive position on the
issues.

Their answers will then be posted on the election website for
public scrutiny and comment and by doing so, we hope to encourage
sustained informed conversations with candidates as well as between members of
the public. This goes beyond ephemeral petition initiatives that
fail to engage and are often quickly forgotten. We intend to forward comments
to candidates on a regular basis and encourage them to reply to constituents
concerns directly.

By taking this approach we are also making the point to candidates
that they are there to listen to their constituents, not we them; they are
there to represent us, not their party. That may require some
head scratching by party apparatchiks who seek to ‘sell’ a message rather than
engage in dialogue. Yet the more we, as constituents, start to
take charge and re-frame the election on our own terms, the less likely we will
be treated as passive consumers of party manifestos written in Westminster by a
political class who know little about the lives of those they claim to speak
for, and care even less.

Whatever the outcome of this experiment, I firmly believe that the
first step towards any re-invigorated democracy must be to
break the stranglehold of an over-centralised party systems that conduct
elections as marketing campaigns; in effect tightly controlled
spectacles, managed by rival teams of PR professionals who select and present a
small range of issues deemed ‘safe’. That can only happen if there are
thousands of ‘assemblies for democracy’, thousands of conversations happening
at the grassroots level where local people start to shape their own manifesto,
town charter or pledge campaign. In other words they become active participants
in shaping the political agenda and by inference, their own future.

There are risks. If assemblies for democracy are adopted on a wide
scale, expect chaos, confusion and much contradiction in the early stages,
not least because we will all have to relearn the political and
democratic skills of active listening, finding common ground, engaging
with sometimes complex issues and forging a consensus with those whose
values and outlook we initially reject as ‘not ours’. For if we are to truly win
back real democracy, we must first practise among ourselves.

A re-invigorated democracy from the grassroots up will not
replace the party system but it will act as a centrifugal force that pulls
power away from Westminster and makes parties much more
porous, open and democratic; that process will also mean dispensing with focus
groups and marketing professionals and instead returning to a
grassroots party activism which interfaces with Assemblies for Democracy and
other related initiatives and in doing so, captures the real voice of the
people.

I will end with one other website I created – a mock election
website called 'Anytown'. It is roughly the direction
I would like to go in although others I am working with are understandably more
sceptical; it is incomplete and rather simplistic, but it does
sketch out some possibilities of how a town, a village, a city or a
constituency might approach electioneering in the future, one that moves
beyond restricted party manifestos and widens to include the voice of the
voluntary sector, freed from undemocratic gagging laws and bullying government
ministers.

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